1. Normas internacionales para
la responsabilidad de las
personas jurídicas
7 Marzo 2013
Patrick Moulette, Jefe
Leah Ambler, Analista Legal
División Anticorrupción de la OCDE

2. Overview
• OECD/UN standards of corporate liability
• Models for liability of legal persons
• Corporate liability caselaw

3. OECD Anti-Bribery Convention
• Entered into force 9 December 1999, 40 States
Parties, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia
and Mexico.
• Article 2, commentary 20 and 2009
Recommendation, Annex I set out the standards
for corporate liability.
• Working Group on Bribery in International Business
Transactions (WGB) and the peer-review process.

4. UN Convention against Corruption
• Entered into force 14 December 2005, 165
States Parties, only 6 out of 34 Parties to the
IACAC have not yet ratified UNCAC.
• Article 26 sets out the requirements for
corporate liability.
• Mechanism for the Review of Implementation
of UNCAC (IRG) and the peer-review process.

5. Common Standards for Corporate Liability
• Establish the liability of legal persons for
corruption/foreign bribery offences.
• Liability may be criminal, civil or administrative.
• Liability should not be restricted to cases where the
natural person(s) who perpetrated the offence are
prosecuted or convicted.
• Legal persons held liable should be subject to effective,
proportionate and dissuasive criminal or non-criminal
sanctions, including monetary sanctions.

6. Sanctions for Legal Persons
• Monetary sanctions
• Confiscation of the bribe and its proceeds
• Loss of tax benefits
• Corporate monitoring
• Debarment
• Reparation
• Suspension
• Dissolution

7. OECD model for liability of legal persons
Annex I: Good Practice Guidance on Implementing
Specific Articles of the Anti-Bribery Convention
• Liability of the legal person separate to liability of the
related natural person
• Flexible to allow for different corporate systems, but
corporate liability must be triggered when:
– Manager offers, promises, or gives a bribe;
– Manager directs a lower level person to bribe; and
– Manager fails to prevent a lower level person from bribing.
• Companies should not be able to avoid liability by
using intermediaries, including related legal persons.

8. Additional Considerations
• Corporate entities covered: SOEs and NGOs
• Corporate liability for all offences, or specific offences
only
– Criminal Code offences
– Bribery and corruption/false accounting/AML/CFT
• Jurisdiction over Legal Persons
– Nationality Jurisdiction vs. Territoriality Jurisdiction
• Liability for the acts of Subsidiaries
– Bribery through intermediaries
• Defences and mitigating factors

9. Forms of Corporate Liability
• Model 1: Identification Doctrine (Ireland/NZ)
– “Directing mind and will”
– Mental state and action at the top of the company
– No aggregate intent

10. Forms of Corporate Liability
• Model 2: Vicarious Liability (U.S.)
– Acting within scope of employment
– For benefit of the company
– Add up intent

11. Forms of Corporate Liability
• Model No 3: Failure to prevent
– Look at whether act alone is illegal
– Then look at corporate culture, policies and
implementation

12. Examples of “Failure to Prevent”
• Chile Law on Criminal Responsibility of Legal Persons
– Article 3: Legal persons shall be responsible … provided that the
commission of the offence results from the breach of the legal person’s
direction and supervisory functions.
– The direction and supervisory functions will be satisfied if, before the
commission of the offence, the legal person had adopted and
implemented the ‘Offences Prevention Model’ (contained in Article 4).
• Australia Criminal Code
– Division 12: a company is liable if its “corporate culture” encouraged,
tolerated or led to the offence, or if it failed to create and maintain a
“corporate culture” that required compliance with the relevant law.
• Canada Criminal Code
– Section 22.2: “With the intent at least in part to benefit the organisation,
one of its senior officers”: […] 3. Knowing that a representative of the
organisation is or is about to be a party to the offence, does not take all
reasonable measures to stop them from being a party to the offence.

13. From theory to practice …
• To date:
– 90 entities have been sanctioned in criminal
proceedings for foreign bribery in 14 States
Parties to the Anti-Bribery Convention;
– 55 entities have been sanctioned for foreign
bribery in administrative and civil cases; and
– the highest sanction for a company is 1.5 billion
euros.

14. Questions?